Naacp Boss Asks Radicals To Play Role

April 10, 1994|By New York Times News Service.

WASHINGTON — The new director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People held a closed meeting Friday with black militants and leftists to discuss increasing their influence in the organization.

The session has angered NAACP board members, who learned of it only afterward.

The meeting in Detroit, organized by the group's executive director, Benjamin Chavis Jr., brought together representatives of what Chavis termed "the pan-African community, the progressive community and the nationalist community."

The meeting, coming after criticism of Chavis within the NAACP for his overtures to the Nation of Islam, appeared to be an attempt to reach out to various sectors of the black political spectrum in order to broaden the organization that is being increasingly seen as ineffective and irrelevant by younger blacks.

Among those invited were Maulana Ron Karenga, a California State professor best known for heading US, a radical nationalist group, and for inventing the holiday known as Kwanzaa; and Angela Davis, a former Communist who was acquitted of kidnapping and murder charges in the taking of hostages from a courtroom in San Rafael, Calif., in 1970. A state judge and three others were killed in the incident.

Also invited were Lenora Fulani, a former presidential candidate, and rap singer Sister Souljah, who was criticized by President Clinton in the 1992 campaign for having once said to a reporter, "If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week to kill white people?"

Others closer to the political mainstream, though still on the political Left, were also invited, including Cornell West, professor of philosophy at Princeton University, and actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.

William Gibson, the organization's chairman, said was he was unaware of the meeting until he was told about it by a reporter Friday night, even though the invitation was sent out under his name.

The meeting was held at a time of extraordinarily sensitive debate within mainstream civil rights organizations about its relationship to more radical groups, fueled by recent controversies over speeches by members of the Nation of Islam.

The conference drew criticism from several members of the NAACP's board, both for the makeup of the participants and for the air of secrecy surrounding it.

"The thing that got me puzzled is why would it have to be a special list?" said Hazel Dukes, a board member from New York. "And why was it confidential?"